Oolite Bulletins

Just another crazy suggestion...

With the various OXPs that we've all added on to introduce financial opportunities, we've all become immensly rich. We then need something to spend our money on.

Is it possible to 'buy' an asteroid in a system and convert it to a Rock Hermit that the player owns?

Why would you do this? The only incentive I can come up with is that the asteroid gets fitted out with repair and maintenance equipment, meaning that when you fly to your home system, you get free maintenance.

Of course, there would be ongoing expenses depending on the stability of the system you've set yourself up in. Presumably a rock in an Anarchy would be attacked more frequently than elsewhere.

Your asteroid could also have a tech level independent of the system (dependant, of course on your willingness to pay for upgrades).

And then when you get even richer, you can have an asteroid in any start system you choose.

(Just another pre-work ramble...)

Happy hunting commanders.

And if it then gets high-jacked by pirates (as in pirate coves oxp) you have got real problems as Galcop would be sending you a court notice as you are the landlord!

If you have moved on to another Galaxy you would find it very time consuming and not to say expensive to get back to sort it out.

But saying all that, I do like the idea.

I might choose Fraggle Rock!

Well...having to pay costs etc should not be a problem. This is really only a proposition for the really wealthy commanders that have nothing to do with the millions of CR they've accumulated...

At the risk of going all SIMS on you all...it doesn't have to be an asteroid either. Why not buy a station to call your own....

If your asteroid has a ship buy/sell menu, it might even be possible to set it up as a "parking garage" where you could keep a back-up ship there.
...This assumes OXPs can change what's available on the ship for sale menu and their prices (to represent storage fees rather than the cost of the ship).

Switeck wrote:

If your asteroid has a ship buy/sell menu, it might even be possible to set it up as a "parking garage" where you could keep a back-up ship there.
...This assumes OXPs can change what's available on the ship for sale menu and their prices (to represent storage fees rather than the cost of the ship).

That's quite a clever way of getting around the "you are the ship" paradigm....assuming it's possible to buy an asteroid / station / system (how much would Lave system be worth to buy 20xGDP perhaps - You'd have to be a filthy rich trader to do something like that...)

cool idea, this sounds like the feature of buying hangars in "Hardwar" (a very underrated little game, i think).

Hi Guys,
In a sense this has been covered before here, but with the emphasis on mining the Asteroid rather than living on it. As you'll see from the thread, it's an idea fraught with difficulty!

I may be wrong on this point, in which case I stand to be corrected..

But I think that the "you are the ship" paradigm is more a way of thinking about the game than an absolute that is impossible to alter. It is a way of saying that the game doesn't take constant account of you as a being aboard an object called a ship.

Now, consider a situation most of us have been in at least once.. You're fighting in your ship and things go very wrong. You manage to hit "eject" and your ship may be gone in a moment, but *you* survive. It is a bit of a setback, that is true enough. But if you have enough in your bank account, you can be back out in space in a new ship in no time.

So you are *not* the ship, except in a manner of speaking.

If it is possible for the player to survive the destruction of the ship by using the escape pod and end up back at a station where they can buy a new ship (if they have enough CR in the bank), then it's obviously not actually "impossible" for them to transfer to another ship if they are at it's docked location.

However, changing the game to the point where players owning places and/or building up a collection of ships or eventually even a fleet of ships they might use to defend and forward the interests of their holdings would be heading in a direction that was never provided for in the original Elite. I think it very unlikely that such a drastic change would be supported as a core change, and more likely it would only happen in any large scale sense as a branch development.

For "the game in the head", though, I think probably many of us have some planet we consider to be our homeworld, whether it is one we adopted or one we think of ourselves as born at. One of the reasons I like the Feudal States OXP is being the knight of a particular house, I can think of myself as having a home of sorts to at least visit and where I learn the surrounding "neighborhood" of systems in more depth than I do for most. I find it good for part of immersion factor. My character may be a wanderer of space, whose *real* home is out in the embrace of the stars, but he can have a place to dock at the end of a long mission or whatever and feel like he "belongs". That's mostly an "in the head" or "roleplay" sort of idea, but it's one I often wish was *more* supported in Oolite. But even as it is, it's supported enough to work for me.

The escape capsule becomes you/the ship when you deploy it. When you reach the station, your insurance replaces your ship as it was* minus any cargo. So there is a continuity. You can sell the replacement for a new ship, but you don't just get a choice as to what ship you want when you land.
This 'You are the ship' really cannot be changed as it is controlled by the save file, and this can only store one entity (you/ship).
I've often thought it would be nice to have a small 'sports-car' that lives in the hold of my Clipper for 'days out' and things like that, but for the same reasons, sadly, it can't be done.

*I'm not sure whether Cloaking Devices are replaced under insurance, or Naval Energy Units if you bought a ship with one but have never been awarded one via a mission.

Bugbear1973 wrote:

Is it possible to 'buy' an asteroid in a system and convert it to a Rock Hermit that the player owns?

Why would you do that when you could buy an already finished RH instead?

Only trouble is that work on OEP appears to have stalled, and as far as I know the buyable stations part has never been released separately.

But possible? Absolutely.

What if when you dock at your asteroid, you then go into the ships for sale menu and find the ships you have collected, you have to "buy" for a very much reduced price. It would reflect the administration costs paid to Galcop for registration fees and informing them you are in a different vessel.

Another thought:- Could you somehow bring abandoned ships back to your little "space station"

Would any of this this work?

No, not with the current Oolite.

Smivs wrote:

The escape capsule becomes you/the ship when you deploy it. When you reach the station, your insurance replaces your ship as it was* minus any cargo. So there is a continuity. You can sell the replacement for a new ship, but you don't just get a choice as to what ship you want when you land.
This 'You are the ship' really cannot be changed as it is controlled by the save file, and this can only store one entity (you/ship).
I've often thought it would be nice to have a small 'sports-car' that lives in the hold of my Clipper for 'days out' and things like that, but for the same reasons, sadly, it can't be done.

*I'm not sure whether Cloaking Devices are replaced under insurance, or Naval Energy Units if you bought a ship with one but have never been awarded one via a mission.

I've thought about this a few times over the years and you comments have got me thinking about it again...

What about a third party app outside of Oolite? When you run Oolite you actually run a batch file that starts Oolite and a save-file monitor/editor. In your example you're flying your clipper - trading, earning cash, moving between systems, every time you save the monitor program updates the relevant points of an alternative save (location, cash, kills, etc) for your sports-ship. So, now it gets to the point where you want to take your sports-ship out for a spin. You therefore load the alternative (and up to date) save file for your other (sporty) ship. You fly around perhaps do a bit of killing, the monitor updates your clipper's save file each time you save. However, to make it a bit more "real" - the monitor could also hide your clipper's save file from being reloaded (renaming it perhaps?) until the system of your sports ship and your clipper match once more...

A bit convoluted but perhaps better than not doing it at all? (and requires no modification to the core Oolite code)

Would it be possible to do it with with an OXP writing out to a file, perhaps? Ships are really just a bit of data. If a file stored the data of all the ships a player owns, and when the player wants to switch ships it could perhaps write a shipdata.plist with the names of the ships the player owns prefaced with maybe the current savegame name. It'd also generate a shipyard.plist with the player ships that should be available at a given location "on sale" for a nominal fee that we could think of as just being a docking charge.

Sure, might have to exit and restart the game while holding down shift to get it to actually work, which is a bit clumsy. But not too bad a tradeoff for being able to own and use more than one ship while keeping the equipment bought for each and the players points and credit balance and legal status intact.

Identifying areas of player/ship unified borg state and separating them is probably the only real obstacle, although there are some practicle considerations related to what to do with cargo if it doesnt fit the new ship, and if pylon mounted gear should be migrated or stay on the old ship, what to do with passengers, etc.

Asking the dev team to make further progress on the separation of player and ship might be a good first step. If we can get to a point that they are reasonably disentangled, then a lot of this will get much easier, and quite a bit of work in that area has been done. Im not too sure how entangled it all is now, it is certainly much nicer than it was.

Making the shipyard fully scriptable might also be possible, which might enable the abuse of it to operate as a garage, as suggested by Fatleaf, but again, that a reasonable chunk of work.